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The Register, citing this Playboy article, reports that a Nevada man named Dennis Montgomery was able in 2003 to connive his way into a position of respectability at the CIA on the basis of his company's claimed ability, using software, to "detect and decrypt 'barcodes' in broadcasts by Al Jazeera, the Qatari news station." Montgomery was CTO of Reno-based eTreppid Technologies, which produced bucketloads of data purported to represent "geographic coordinates and flight numbers" hidden in these broadcasts. All of which, it seems, was hokum, finally debunked in cooperation with a branch of the French intelligence service — but not, says the article, before the fabricated information, chalked up to "credible sources," was used as justification to ground some international flights, and even evacuate New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Not quite. This was just a scam although it could have been a lot worse. The basic problem is that a lot of people don't really understand technology. If there's going to be any Mccarthy style overreaction it should be to throw this guy in jail for a long, long time.

The basic problem is that we pay these folks to think like a paranoid (albeit with a little dose of common sense, and some thoroughness when needed). We basically got what we paid for. It sounds like some background checks where in order.

The scary thing is that they did to background checks. And security checks. If you believe TFA, they did "due diligence" multiple times. The perps managed to scam that in two ways - first, they scammed the government into handing over millions for "R&D" and they pulled that scam off several times with different groups throughout the government. Second, they somehow managed to come in contact with a number of influential people, both within government and the just plain rich and dumb and they scammed them for all it's worth.

Sociopathy and social engineering. A win every time. For a while, at least.

Everyone is under a lot of pressure to perform. I worked for a defense contractor for 2 projects. The 1st project was a success, and the 2nd was a complete disaster. On that 2nd project, the customers were asking for a great deal, and many of them didn't understand that. They wanted in 1 year what had previously taken 15 years to do, and instead of being helpful, kept on throwing up idiotic roadblocks, for political reasons. As in, no non-American software allowed, because terrorists might have programmed in back doors and booby traps. That wasn't the real reason-- what they were really trying to do was force the use of what they were comfortable with, which was Windows. Security was the ultimate excuse, and was roundly abused to justify anything they wished.

Unfortunately, our management opted for dishonesty, in so far as they could agree on anything at all. Kissed up mightily, promising to do the job in 6 months knowing full well that they could not, and then tried to baffle with bull. Played along with the politicking. Leaned on their own people to rubberstamp things, or dress stuff up, and fought with each other over what we should do. Paralyzed by impossible and contradictory demands, and rank incompetence, we ended up accomplishing absolutely nothing. Gave the customers manure for a year, and that was not entirely unwelcome to some of the customers as they used us to hire a few favorites, and order equipment they'd get to keep after we crashed and burned. When enough of the customers at last got wise, the management blamed everything on us underlings and fired us all, to gain themselves more time. That didn't work for long, and finally, the contract was cancelled. Was the most miserable job experience I ever had.

This sort of scam is entirely believable. The defense people are suckers for security theater. Not the brightest at seeing through it, nor are they particularly good at telling the honest and competent from the dishonest and incompetent, even when it should be obvious. They don't help themselves when they engage in their own brand of lying, and collude. Honest contractors have a rough time being heard above the noise made by the legions of incompetent liars who are willing to promise anything to get that contract.

I imagine that the software actually did pull out numbers out of the transmissions but that they were basically semi-random and then all it takes is a bit of over-analysis and you have a credible source:D

Wikipedia has a pile of links at the bottom of the page you can follow.

I can't find a record of a denial by the White House, and the guys who leaked the memo went to jail for it. Maybe the White House did issue an actual denial (I didn't search that much), and maybe there was something in the memo that wasn't Al Jazeera-related, that was why they went to jail.

But apparently it's well-acknowledged by everyone that there was a memo, but whether or not that memo contained any information about bombing Al Jazeera has not been confirmed nor denied.

That being said, I would be very shocked if this event didn't unfold in a similar form to the accusation. It would be a natural question as to whether or not to attack Al Jazeera—it's an uncontrolled media establishment operating in the war zone. If the question didn't arise, it would be remiss of those in charge. To actually bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar would be a capital B-A-D bad idea, so, if it was considered, it was rightly dropped.

I really hope it didn't actually come down to Bush and Blair having a discussion about it. The idea should have been considered and discarded before it got that high.

That's pretty much exactly what happened to a few of the people who ended up at Guantanmo Bay -- rewards were offered for tips that led to the capture of terrorists or terrorist sympathizers in Afghanistan in ~2001-2002. It worked great, as they began receiving a ton of tips from the formerly unhelpful local populace. It seems fairly obvious now that a not insignificant amount of the tips were completely fabricated, indicating that people who were completely unrelated to any real sympathy for al'Qaeda, or perhaps people who were the target of grudges, were doing things that they were not doing, or wanted to do things that they did not want to do.

Nobody seemed to care very much, since it didn't involve US citizens, and since people had let fear control their lives and did not want to take any chances, no matter how remote they are. Hey Sarge, Habib from Jalalabnotgonnaworkhereanymore says this derka farmer in a village 10 miles away hates America! What are the chances Habib would lie to us?

In August 2005, lead interrogator Specialist Glendale Wells of the US army pleaded guilty at a military court to pushing Dilawar against a wall and doing nothing to prevent other soldiers from abusing him. Wells was subsequently sentenced to two months in a military prison. Two other soldiers convicted in connection with the case escaped custodial sentences. The sentences were criticized by Human Rights Watch.

or tortured to death despite being completely innocent. [wikipedia.org].

And the people who killed him were charged with murder.

No. The low-level guys got minor slaps on the wrist and the officers got awards.

For example, the officer in command of the unit that tortured people to death at Bagram (Carolyn Wood [wikipedia.org]) was awarded awarded a bronze star and then transferred to Abu Ghraib where the prisoner famous abuses then took place and then she was awarded another bronze star.

So,just from that, it's pretty clear that the Bush administration (and their supporters) really just didn't care. But more fundamentally, it's been common knowledge in civilized countries for hundreds of years that if you set up a "justice" system without proper checks and balances (right to counsel, habeas corpus, etc) that your "justice" system is going to do bad things (torture) to innocent people.

Oh, they cared. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, as National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice ok'd the use of waterboarding on a per-prisoner basis. Dick Cheney was involved in meetings about exactly what methods would be used.

It's not that the top brass didn't care: They did care, and approved of it.

Its incidents like this that have produced a lot of the hatred towards the US overseas.

Its important, if you claim the moral imperative, to show that you are ensuring your armed forces are living up to it. While I think the invasion of Afghanistan was the correct move, and I support the troops over there wholeheartedly (including those from Canada, my home country), I think Iraq was actually a mistake, or at the least has been grossly mismanaged. All the US is achieving is to produce a few thousand more peo

The US paid $1000 for David Hicks [wikipedia.org]. In a way Hicks was lucky because the Northern Alliance were using the invasion as an excuse to massacre any forigeners they came across. Note that both the US and Australia could not find any law that Hicks's had broken, in the end they just made up a new law and applied it retrospectively.

And you are sure this did not happen? And you are sure that he was the only person giving information to the CIA?People ratted out others in Afghanistan and Iraq for money. The fact that those people were innocent did not stop them from getting the money and the people being deported.Don't forget, everybody is guilty by association.

It is "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon". That is one random person. That means you will be 6 degrees away from a terrorist. The difference is that all people in the 5th degree will beco

Frances Townsend, a homeland security adviser to Bush, said she did not regret having relied on Montgomery's mysterious intelligence. "It didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. We were relying on technical people to tell us whether or not it was feasible," she said.

"It didn't seem beyond the realm of possibility. We were relying on shit like this to maintain the illusion that we are doing something to combat terrorism. When he asked to close the museum of modern art, we were overjoyed. Talk about high-profile!"

The reality is that there is one and only one way to combat terrorism against the US: stop training terrorists and betraying them.

Must have missed the part where we betrayed the Mujaheddin to the Soviets as well as the part where any of those Afghani fighters were involved in the events of 9/11. Unless by 'betrayed' you mean the war ended, most of the foreign fighters left Afghanistan, we were no longer needed so stopped training, and the groups of foreign fighters began to self-radicalize as only the more radical members interested in fighting foreign powers rather than defending Islamic lands remained while the rest went home.

The 'your own fault for ever having helped them' adage is certainly drawing psychologically but doesn't really hold water. You might as well blame the Cold War on us helping the Soviets fight the Germans rather than any sort of clash of political and economic ideals. Or blame the German invasion of Russia solely on Russian's steel trade with Germany up until the morning of rather than even note Hitler is doing anything wrong in wanting to take over the world. And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.

The 'your own fault for ever having helped them' adage is certainly drawing psychologically but doesn't really hold water. You might as well blame the Cold War on us helping the Soviets fight the Germans rather than any sort of clash of political and economic ideals.

That's not entirely untrue. One of the reasons communist China existed as it did was because of pressure from the US for the USSR to declare war on Japan, most likely to help mitigate American casualties in any invasion of the Japanese mainland

That's not entirely untrue. One of the reasons communist China existed as it did was because of pressure from the US for the USSR to declare war on Japan, most likely to help mitigate American casualties in any invasion of the Japanese mainlands. This pressure was also exerted to draw Soviet forces away from Europe, where there was a genuine fear about further war, after the Nazis fell, between the West and the Soviets. In hindsight this war was not very likely, but there was a genuine, well-founded fear and distrust of Stalin.

I would think the war declaration would have more to do with Japan invading under pretext and occupying Manchuria back in 1931. Heck it wasn't until 1941 when the US entered the war that China really got substantial help and by then China was largely controlled by the Japanese. I would say that China's ineffective defense of itself during that war definitely helped the communists.

Comparing our voluntary invasion of sovereign nations to WWII and the Revolutionary War is completely ridiculous. Afghanistan's government requested Soviet military support to quell the fundamentalist Islamo-Fascists from overthrowing their secular Marxist government. We decided to punish the CCCP by "giving them their own Vietnam." We gathered every crazy Islamic fundamentalist we could lay our hands on, trained them, and showed that it was possible to defeat a world superpower. We poured billions of dollars of weapons into the country, and Russia poured billions in, and we had a proxy war that completely destroyed Afghanistan, and killed possibly millions of people. Then, as soon as the Russians left, refused to give a dime to build anything.

If it was just limited to Afghanistan, I could say it was an honest, one time mistake. However, we have invaded and overthrown so many democratic governments that it's almost a farce at this point to claim that we support freedom. It's obvious that we support whatever entity follows our orders. The only thing that will make the US care about your freedom is if you have some resource under your feet and a governent that is not playing ball.

And here's the amazing part about your post:

And I suppose we fought the British solely because they trained us how to fight during the French and Indian war and like us should have had the decades of foresight to know they'd be better off not providing aid and letting their enemy take over those lands.

Now, who decided that Britain's imperial claim to whatever they wanted was moral? Because if all you need to justify taking the lives of foreign nationals is the desire to have their stuff, then apparently you do not subscribe to any sort of value system, other than might makes right.

Comparing our voluntary invasion of sovereign nations to WWII and the Revolutionary War is completely ridiculous. Afghanistan's government requested Soviet military support to quell the fundamentalist Islamo-Fascists from overthrowing their secular Marxist government.

Not quite true. Afghanistan had a Marxist, Soviet-aligned government threatened by Islamist ("Islamo-Fascism" is a bullshit term that has nothing to do with history), US-backed insurgents, but they specifically told the Soviet Union NOT to send troops, knowing that it would severely harm the government's already fragile public support. The Soviet Union decided to be its usual arrogant self and figured that it knew socialism a hell of a lot better than the silly Afghans, and that its own interests were paramount (a US-backed regime on their border wasn't a happy prospect for them), and invaded anyway, toppled the Marxist government and installed a puppet regime.

I've read a bunch about what lead to the conflict in Afghanistan, even the interviews with Brzezinski on how the CIA plotted to draw Russia in. What is your source stating that the Afghan government told the Soviets that they didn't want support?

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

That is not quite true, too. Nur Mohammad Taraki (the president of Afghanistan in 1978) asked the Soviet Union to help, but was overthrown and killed by Hafizullah Amin (who wasn't quite a friend of the USSR). He was assassinated by Soviet commandos (Alfa), then USSR invaded Afghanistan to reinstall the government of Taraki back.

It's not just that. These people are also enraged at what they see as US imperialism in the Middle East. With all the invasions and troops deployed to the region, and all the coups, it is a wonder to me that the US isn't constantly being bombed by disaffected people of all stripes.

i agree with your first point, this whole "do something" disease has to stop. doing something just for the sake of doing something is never the right solution.

as for your other point. while i don't agree that we trained all the terrorists in the world today, i know we train people we shouldn't train and they will come back to haunt us. however, i will not agree that we betrayed most of them and surely that is not why they want to blow themselves up. stop with this battered wife syndrome mentality of it's our fault, if we just didn't upset them they won't beat/kill us anymore. ridiculous!

take for instance Afghanistan. we "trained" them to fight the Soviets(biggest problem at the time). when the Soviets left, we used diplomacy and agreed with them to keep our hands off Afghanistan, there was no longer any Soviets in country for our new "allies" to fight. leaving them to form their own country is not a betrayal. do you really want to argue that we should of went in and set up our form of government? we did the right thing and it came back to bite us in the ass. damned if we do, damed if we don't. it's a little more complicated then, we upset some people 20 years ago and they are still trying to pay us back. if anything, diplomacy with our enemies(Soviets) led to this.

The reality is that there is one and only one way to combat terrorism against the US: stop training terrorists and betraying them.

Bzzzzt!

The only way to effectively combat terrorism is to stop freaking the fuck out. By definition terrorists want to create terror. So stop over-reacting. Stop treating terrorism as some special evil that is a force unto itself worthy of endless news coverage and the constant ratcheting up of 'safety' rules. Live our lives as the free and the brave, not pathetic slaves to fear.

Agreed - and to strike with deadly, serious, respected force when we are fucked with. The war in Afghanistan should have been swift, brutal, and left lots of people dead. The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland. And that should have been that - instead we've dawdled around for 8+ years now, started a second war in Iraq that was basically unjustified, and essentially a waste of resources. And we forgot to finish

The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland.

How many Afghans attacked the US (in 2001 or any other year)? Exactly ZERO. The majority of the supposed attackers were Saudis, so should we have blasted our closest ally in the Middle East to smithereens? That sure would send an unmistakable signal. Or maybe we should have blown the crap out of our other close ally Pakistan, where much of the funding originated? Or m

strike with deadly, serious, respected force when we are fucked with. The war in Afghanistan should have been swift, brutal, and left lots of people dead. The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland.

Errr, refresh my memory - when was the last time that the PEOPLE of Afghanistan ever did anything to the people of America, apart form growing a large proportion of the world's supply of heroin precursors, then selling it t

That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inauguration speech in 1933 during the Great Depression. I was starting to wonder why I should bother posting this info until it prompted me to look for a bit more info on it and I found this cool site: http://www.bartleby.com/124/ [bartleby.com]

which contains the texts of the inauguration speeches for all of the Presidents of the US. Here's the actual quote, with a little more context:

I AM certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

When "their" interests dovetail with "our" own short-term self-interest, we brand them rebels, or better yet, freedom fighters. When they're on the other side, they're always terrorists...

Conditions change, and the enemy of our enemy can no longer be our friend - betrayal ensues, and blood oaths are uttered - and suddenly the 180-degree transformation is complete. This is the folly of short-term, self-serving isolationist interest as a valid option for

Bullshit relativism redux. A freedom fighter doesn't kill people, by my definition. But even by your definition, who do you think it is that funds and approves the evils that your supposed "freedom fighter" is opposing? It's the civilians! Did we band together and put a stop to Bush's atrocities? No. Why not? Because a vast majority of us believe that killing can be done in the service of good.

If you want to know why the World Trade Center was destroyed, just ask Thomas Aquinas.

Sure, one have to target soldiers (not that you don't label guerrilla fighters as terrorists too). But soldiers are just young men who decide nothing, so it is better to target officers. Even better -- target generals. Hell, target the Commander-in-Chief, he's the one in charge!Except that in a democracy, he is not. He got elected, you know. Twice, in some cases.Now tell me, are your so-called civilians really innocent when they support Commander-in-Chief and his wars so they can continue to thrive in their

While the spirit of your post is true, I find it useful to distinguish acts of terrorism and terrorists themselves by the qualifier that they are indiscriminate in their targets: civilian, military, government, it doesn't matter (or they purposely target civilians). I learned this distinction from a fellow student of anthropology and it stuck with me.

“What were we going to do and how would we screen people? If we weren’t comfortable we wouldn’t let a flight take off.”

Why are they still following flights and such so closely, while leaving all the other ways open? It wouldn't have the same effect this time, because terrorists just go for emotions of people to get their message out.

Why are they still following flights and such so closely, while leaving all the other ways open?

Good question. I imagine the answer is because the terrorist groups that most concern the CIA seem obsessed with passenger airplanes along with some combination of bureaucratic momentum and "fighting the last war" going on.

Because the US is now self-terrorizing, no bombers needed. We needlessly disrupt and frighten on our own to keep people on edge. And because once grown, government never shrinks, the massive increase in HSA and other such frightmongering will be a part of our culture (and budget) for the rest of United States history.

“What were we going to do and how would we screen people? If we weren’t comfortable we wouldn’t let a flight take off.”

Why are they still following flights and such so closely, while leaving all the other ways open? It wouldn't have the same effect this time, because terrorists just go for emotions of people to get their message out.

Seems like hysterical thinking for me.

Totally agree. I took Amtrak recently and I was *shocked* that there was absolutely no baggage screening or even a metal detector I had to go through to board the train--you just show up with your bags and walk in without any security, ID checks, or bag checks whatsoever. They don't even check for your ticket until about a half hour into the train ride. Sure, airport security sucks, but the last couple of major terrorist attacks in Europe were on trains and we still don't care about trains? This convince

You can't hijack a train, and take it somewhere else, later ramming it into a huge building full of people in some other city.

And... try going the combination of things you need to do in order to, say, steer a train pulling large payloads of dangerous chemicals someplace it's not supposed to go. You have to take over the locomotive and get control of the railyard switching systems and be able to magically control other trains to make sure they're not in your way.

Simply blowing up some passengers in the trains, a la Madrid, isn't as sexy in the US, since the attackers need to rise to the same level as their last large domestic attack, or appear to be (as they are) not as capable as they once were.

"the attackers need to rise to the same level as their last large domestic attack, or appear to be (as they are) not as capable as they once were."

Don't follow international events much, do you? Are you under the impression that Hamas has abandoned the suicide belt or that the FARC has given up on snipers? It's never made much difference to terrorist groups whether Bomb #3 kills more people than Bomb #2 did, it's just not important. The only thing of import is to sow more terror.

Here came someone with a magic box who provided an easy solution, and the eggheads and their political masters bought it hook, line and sinker. What I find extraordinary is that the NSA was not involved or asked to vet this guy's findings. Billions of dollars and some of the finest brains working there, and no one thought to call them? Looks like even in 2003 inter-agency cooperation wasn't going very well.He was CIAs asset, and they were not going to share.

My conclusion: con man, and he will probably get away with this, because the government can not publicly prosecute him without looking like an Idiot.

According to TFA, that's exactly what happened. Intel professionals called bullshit several times, but were essentially overruled because a) it might, just might, maybe in a parallel universe or with the right pixie dust, might work and b) more importantly advanced a specific political agenda with the higher ups.

Imagine what would have happened if this software's prediction happened to match an actual attack, and they had ignored it. Nostradamus was a smart guy, but not because of his ability to accurately predict...

He told Bauder to listen to the phone. "'When you hear the tone, I want you to hit the space bar on the keyboard.'" Bauder, in other words, would be secretly communicating with Montgomery while the military guys watched the supposed software demo on another computer.

...and at the time, he seriously didn't find it the least bit suspicious? This stretches credibility, either they're all huge idiots, or they were playing along while the going was good.

What I find extraordinary is that the NSA was not involved or asked to vet this guy's findings.

Most likely they were and warned about it but were over-ruled by some horse judge with connections.It's another symptom of the transformation to corrupt third world tinpot dictatorship that the Neocons were pushing as hard as they could.

That software, coupled with the (ok, Hanlon should be right) stupidity of the ones believing in this software was right and acting according should be punished. They were doing the work of terrorists, spreading panic between people.

In the other hand, should be a lesson to government between the difference of open and closed source. Snake oil is harder to sell if you can peek at the formula.

So, who do you think will be prosecuted for this? The guy who told them this nonsense, or the CIA guy who payed him to produce the "intel" they wanted to hear?

Along with the recently-revealed origin of the "45 minutes" claim here in the UK, this starts to paint a picture of the way the War on Terror is justified: agencies don't make stuff up: they pay some idiot to make stuff up, so that when questions are asked, blame can go to the idiot instead of the highly-trained people that somehow end up listening to idiots.

This also shows how easy it is to fool most people by treating computers like magic. You can't say stuff came to you in a vision anymore, but claim that magic software told you and most people are too scared of technical stuff to think to hard about it.

Yes, And this is why information theory needs to be taught in kinder garden, the problems being that A. Most Teachers Don't Understand Information Theory and B. Nobody has come up with a way to conceptualize Information Theory in a way that can be thought to very young kids and then built on through out there education. B is probably quite doable but A is really going to be the big stumbling block. But since Information Theory can be applied to most anything it would very beneficial to our society to groov

The person who knowingly sells parts or software or equipment to the government is attempting sabotage.

I assume you left out the word "defective" there (or something like it)? Otherwise you're trying to criminalize people for just honestly selling ordinary stuff to the government. Even for a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, that's a little extreme.

He did say "knowingly sells software (etc.)" - missing the word "defective" - and with the parent poster, I'm not sure that shooting up nearly every software vendor in existence would really help us. Unless you plan a hostile takeover...

Wait, now I see it! Here's what you should do if you own an unsuccesfull software company that never sold anything to the government!

1. Introduce plan to shoot all software saboteurs2. Leave out the word "defective" so every current government software-supplier gets shot3.

The person who knowingly sells parts or software or equipment to the government is attempting sabotage. We need to return to the quite legal custom of executing saboteurs.

You've missed my point, which is that the Government agent who knowingly *purchased* the defective software is also a saboteur (and in this case I find it extremely difficult to believe that they did not know the software was nonsense).

I know from someone who worked in the DOD these cons can come across a single desk more than once a week, with, interestingly, professional presentations totally at odds with the quality of the science. If it were your job to sort through these, and if you had to sort through HUNDREDS in your career, then the one con who got lucky guesses (law of averages and all) during your testing of him would end your career. Remember a 99% accurate test is wrong 1% of the time. Also consider it can be just as bad (or worse) if you turn someone away who did have something novel, especially if it costs lives.

And it's a coincidence that the one hoax that happened to click with their existing obsession with spy-thriller plots to down airliners got accepted and the ones which can predict when Canada will invade or identify terrorists from their shoe sizes or estimate the odds of Mickey Mouse defecting to the Russians didn't? (I consider these to make about as much sense as each other).

Yes, people should lose their jobs if they judge things based on the professionalism of the presentation instead of its content ("

I worked for a Very Large Company looking to buy image compression software from this dude many years back. A co-worker did some extremely clever testing of the compression software that proved conclusively that the compression algorithms were cheating, and that it was intentional fraud. Upper management still wanted to believe the cheater and not our own internal debunking. Amazing how non-objective people can be, even (or especially) managers of scientists and engineers.

lossy advertized as lossless?Drop every second outgoing frame from 50FPS stream, send at 25FPS, then double each arriving frame and advertize maintained 50FPS?Provide just some scrambling with zero compression?

It might have hidden part of the data elsewhere. I can get an illusory 1% edge over any existing product by moving 1% of the resulting file somewhere else and pulling it back when uncompression occurs.

The usual cheating is to pretend to "compress" the data, but actually hide it some other place on the machine.

So you get a smaller filesize, and it decompresses alright too.

But copy the "compressed" file to another machine without copying the hidden data and it "fails" to decompress.

It's better than that. If you're using NTFS or HFS+, you can squirrel the data away in an Alternate Data Stream/Resource Fork and the data will be copied around with the file. In a real sense, it is part of the file and yet not. Might even get copied to another machine if the medium was a suitably-formatted device (not sure about that).

The Lord's Army in Uganda is a terrorist organization, so was the Shinning Path in Peru. What empire does Uganda or Peru need to renounce? When a Sunny terrorist blows up a Shiite mosque in Pakistan, what empire does the Shiite minority needs to renounce?

I could bring a large number of examples where terrorism has more to do with ideology, racism and religious fanaticism than with any notions of empire and its side effects. Just because the most notorious forms of terrorism (Islamic terrorism affecting the Western World) can be explained as a reaction of empire building, that does not mean the phenomenon of terrorism can be explained in those terms, much less solved from those premises.

The easiest way to answer a moral question without actually answering it is by pitching empty slogans. It sure feels great to say them (oh man, do you feel me? I do stand for something, so cliche... I mean avant garde!)...

... but they are a dime a dozen and don't amount to much anyway. A moral point based on a fallacious premise is an empty one, a fallacy and a slogan. Try harder. Try better.

</rant>

On another note, if the story is true, I do hope Montgomery and whoever up the intelligence food chain that was too stupid to paid him for his snake oil go burn in hell.

Better question - when an anti-abortionist blows up a an abortion clinic, what empire needs to be renounced? What empire lead to the Oklahoma bombing? When neo-nazis plan terrorist attacks in Europe, what empire needs to be renounced?

That'll be good to know for when we start taking colonies again. Until then it is tangental at best to the situation.

Things probably would have gone a lot smoother had the invasions been part of a plan to take those countries as colonies since you don't even have to pretend to play nice with the locals and their political schemes.